Case matters with SFMT

While a big portion of SFDC is not case sensitive, its standalone Ant-based tool IS, every bit of it.  Whenever I stumpled on that, the failure messages weren't that obvious on the reason.  For instance, if I got the object name's case wrong, it would complain about field names on the object not in package.xml.  Yeah, big help here!  I know, I know,  XML is case sensitive... but it's still inconvenient.

Two SFDC tips helpful for me today

• Show/Hide stuff on VF page with AJAX
  http://forums.sforce.com/t5/Visualforce-Development/Basic-Show-Hide-pageBlockSection-not-working/m-p/168722
  Basically the rule is to always have the rerendered region bigger than the stuff that has conditional visibility.  If they are the same size, you may have the problem of things unable to become visible, because the rerendering never works due to the id not being there the first place.
  
• Create checkbox list on the fly
  http://blog.jeffdouglas.com/2009/01/13/apex-search-with-checkbox-results/
  This is common for searching-then-processing.  However the approach isn't necessary for simple situations where you just need simple labels.  You can just use the built-in SelectOption class and <apex:selectCheckboxes>. 
  

The perils of ImplicitParent

Luckily we're not talking about lost biological father or shared custody.  Those could be worse battles, but this one isn't easy to deal with either.  If you have an elaborate sharing scheme set up in Salesforce.com with roles and sharing rules in Salesforce.com, and you feel very safe about it, you may be in a surprise when accidentally exposed - by ImplicitParent.  That's a rowCause in tables like AccountShare.  The Reason in the documentation (APEX Dev Guide) for the rowCause is "Associated record owner or sharing", which isn't quite clear to understand what it means.  This link may explain it better.  Basically that indicates the Account record is being shared out to users who have access to Opportunities or Cases on the account by ownership or sharing rules.  Now you see the danger?

I had just such a case happened to me.  A business unit is isolated by sharing model and rules so their records can't be seen by other users.  Then an admin imported some opportunities under that unit's master Account record with himself as owner.  Shortly after his role was changed for testing things - that change added 4 ImplicitParent rows to the AccountShare for the master Account record, because other than himself, there're sharing rules defined for the new role to give more access to others.  All of a sudden the master Account unit and all its Contacts children with sensitive data were exposed to a whole lot new audience (Contacts are "Controlled by Parent").  Luckily all of this were caught in a dry run.  Scary!

Setting up SVN service on Windows XP

Had to do it to tie me over for some proejcts and here are what I found out:

1. This is a good guide to follow on setting up a simple Windows SVN server.
2. One thing to keep in mind is that using SC command on Windows, you need to be careful about escaping the double quote if you have a path that requires it, or better yet, just choose a path that doesn't need quoting. If the quotation marks aren't done appropriately, you end up with incorrect path in the registry, and the service can't be started with the error 1053 ("The service did not respond...")
3. svnserve.exe can't use mapped drive for repository. Use local directory. Otherwise 1053 again.
4. Remember there should be no leading space in any conf file lines, and there needs to be space on both sides of any "=". Otherwise you get the cryptic "option expected" message when issuing commands.